1. Technical Field of Invention
The present invention relates to a printing apparatus, a printing method, and a printing system comprising a storage unit, such as a hard disk drive, and in particular to a printing apparatus, a printing method, and a printing system which enables a file stored in the storage unit to be read, specified, and reprinted.
2. Description of the Related Art
For example, a printing apparatus such as an ink jet printer or a laser printer controls a print engine based on print data received from a host computer for executing predetermined printing. In the host computer, the documents to be printed are prepared with various application programs such as a document preparation program and a drawing preparation program.
If the user wants to print one of the prepared documents, the document is converted into predetermined print data corresponding to the printing apparatus for printing the document by a printer driver corresponding to the printing apparatus. The print data is transferred to the printing apparatus connected to the host computer. The print data from the host computer is first stored in a reception buffer in the printing apparatus, next expanded into bit image data in a work area provided in a memory, then the bit image data is written into an output buffer. The data stored in the output buffer is transferred to a print head section in accordance with a predetermined technique and is printed.
With normal printing apparatus, print data is discarded after printing. If the user later wants to reprint one of the documents printed in the past, the steps of preparing the print data, expanding the print data into the bit image data, etc., will be executed again.
In recent years, occasion to print not only text data, but also image data having a large amount of data has increased. To reprint image data, a large amount of print data must be again transferred to a printing apparatus, which requires a long transfer time, prolonging the time to the print end.
A printing apparatus which is provided with a storage unit, such as a hard disk drive or a flash memory, and can store print data input from a host computer in the storage unit is also proposed.
Since the conventional printing apparatus comprises the storage unit, a file printed in the past (print data file) can be called and specified, whereby it can be reprinted. Therefore, the host computer need not prepare the print data and the print data stored in the printing apparatus needs only to be specified, so that a large amount of print data, such as image data, can be printed promptly.
However, in the conventional printing apparatus, the files stored in the storage unit are managed according to the file names specified when the files are input from the host computer, thus the user must specify the file to be reprinted with only the file name as a key. Therefore, since the user may specify a file different from the desired file; erroneous print easily occurs and there is a problem in ease of use. A user can grasp the correspondence between the file names and the file contents when a few number of files are stored in the storage unit. However, as the number of stored files grows, it becomes difficult to grasp the correspondence between the file names and the file contents and the possibility of erroneous print rises.
Particularly, in recent years, occasion to share a printing apparatus under a network environment, such as a LAN (local area network) or an intranet, has increased. With such a network printer, a number of users store a number of files in the storage unit of the printing apparatus by giving adequate file names to the files, thus it furthermore becomes difficult to accurately grasp the correspondence between the file names and the file contents.
FIG. 17 is a schematic representation to show how to specify reprint with the conventional printing apparatus. Information on the files stored in the storage unit of the printing apparatus and the current file being printed can be read by using a dedicated utility program installed in the host computer. The file name of the current file being printed, the user name of the user making a request for printing the file, the time, the date, and the data size are displayed in the upper part of FIG. 17. The file names of already printed files and the like are displayed in the lower part of FIG. 17. It is difficult to specify the file to be reprinted only by attribute information of the file name, the user name, the data size, the print time and date, etc., and erroneous print easily occurs.